Quote: So I still have to decide what is the best solution: HDD, DVD, MiniDV, tape or whatever. I find it maximal confusing to be honest
Well you can already exclude the DVD-Camcorders because they are just crap. Here you have an on-the-fly MPEG Encoding which results in typical block artefacts as you don't have the power of a workstation and enough time for motion scanning and so on to use the little bandwith you have to its limits. When you're even going to cut your videos and encode it yet again then it gets even worse so don't touch those...
So what stays is HDD and MiniDV (what is a tape). I'm not up to date with the recent HDD cameras but my recommendation would go to the MiniDVs. This method is cheaper and you are more flexible with this. Besides I don't know if some HDD Camcorders still do the pretty much the same as the DVD camcorders do (i.e. save the video as MPEG-II files) or if they use something else now. If you consider to buy a High-Definition camcorder the HDD versions might just be fine as they should record in WMV9 or something. But there still is the price tag because 40GB aren't that much and when it's full it gets rather complicated to tape even more as you have to save your 40GB of film somewhere to get your small hard drive free. That's the point where the tapes are very handy - just throw in another tape which will give you an hour or two of filming and put the first tape in your cupboard...
